Lawsuit faults heat, tainted water in Texas prisons

The Texas prison system is exposing elderly, ill and disabled inmates to dangerous heat conditions with limited access to safe drinking water, a public health expert testified Friday.

Michael McGeehin, a national expert on heat exposure, told U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison that the situation is urgent at the Pack Unit in Navasota, where inmates are trying to force the state to provide an alternative to well water that contains elevated levels of arsenic.

“If you’re asking me if I can say to a captive population, ‘You should continue to drink this water until it gets fixed,’ I can’t,” testified McGeehin, a former division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McGeehin capped two days of testimony from authorities in corrections, health and environmental regulation this week as the inmates seek an emergency injunction to force state action.

The judge said he could rule on the question of an alternate water supply as early as this week.

“It’s clear we are all uncomfortable with the circumstances under which these men find themselves,” Ellison told the attorneys Friday.

Six inmates sued in federal court in 2014 over what they say are inhumane conditions that violate their rights under the U.S. Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act. They are seeking to turn the case into a class-action lawsuit, which could have broad implications for inmates and prison staff across the state and in other jurisdictions where prisons lack air-conditioning systems.

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The inmates’ lawsuit was triggered by an unprecedented heat wave in the summer of 2011, when 10 inmates died of heat exposure in non-air-conditioned Texas prisons. Two more inmates died from extreme heat in 2012. The families of eight of those inmates filed separate wrongful death suits in 2012 and 2013.

Not an ‘emergency’

The latest lawsuit is the first to challenge state standards for Texas inmates in non-air-conditioned prisons. It was filed by minimum-security inmates at the Pack Unit whose ages, health conditions or psychiatric medications put them at higher risk for heat-related illness or death.

The plaintiffs include a morbidly obese 61-year-old who takes medication for schizophrenia, an obese 72-year-old with hypertension and depression that requires medication and 70-year-old with diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The federal suit claims the heat conditions are not only dangerous but also punitive and calls for the judge to compel the prison to reduce the temperature to a safe level or move vulnerable inmates to safe dorms during heat waves.

Arsenic has been found in the well water at the Pack Unit at levels that violate the Environmental Protection Agency’s cap for safe amounts, and the Pack Unit operates one of 60 Texas water systems that are out of compliance with the federal standard, according to testimony from Michael Honeycutt, director of toxicology at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Prior to 2001, the EPA’s cap for safe amounts of arsenic in an aquifer was 50 parts per billion (PPB), Honeycutt said.

A federal law lowered the cap to 10 PPB, he said, and enforcement of that level began in 2006. The Pack Unit put in a new filtration system in 2007, but the water still tests at 25 or 30 PPB, he said.

Honeycutt, however, told the judge that the EPA’s own recommendations indicate that even those elevated levels do not “constitute an emergency” and would not require anyone to avoid drinking the water.

When the inmates’ lawyer, Jeff Edwards, asked Honeycutt if he would drink the Pack Unit water, he said he would.

Water remedies sought

Cody Ginsel, the deputy director of management operations for Texas prisons, testified that he drank two glasses of Pack Unit water the other day. Ginsel said bringing in water and making ice for over 1,400 inmates presented a storage problem.

Bottles of water at the commissary sell for about 30 cents but not every inmate has the resources to purchase bottled water. The prison recommends inmate drink up to 2 gallons per day when the heat index rises above a certain level.

State criminal justice and environmental officials told the court the water quality must be remedied, and the government has taken steps to make changes. However, state experts said they do not consider it an emergency. A new filtration system should be installed in the unit perhaps as early as January.

High doses of arsenic over a long period of time can cause lung, bladder, kidney and skin cancer, said Heidi Bojes, director of environmental injury epidemiology and toxicology at the Department of State Health Services.

Bojes testified Thursday, however, that she did not believe the levels inmates were ingesting at the Pack Unit are perilous.